Thursday, June 11, 2015

The digital version of the album is now up on Bandcamp! Please tell folks about it!

If you're a CSA member or if you donated to the campaign, you should by now have received an email from me with the link to download the album via Dropbox. (If you didn't, please let me know!)

If you still want to support the cost of making this and future albums, you are very welcome to do so by donating directly on the Bandcamp page embedded above, or via the Paypal button below!

Progress: $5,190

Members of my CSA will be getting digital and eventually physical copies of the album for free. The album will stream for free for anyone, but non-CSA members will be asked to donate something to download it. (CSA members of course are welcome to donate if they really want to, and many have been, which is just wonderful...)

REWARDS:
You can donate any amount, by clicking the "donate" button above, or by sending a check in the mail to me at PO Box 86805, Portland, OR 97286 (USA). Donate an amount equal to or above any of the amounts listed below, and you can get that award upon request. Just let me know in the comments section or by emailing me which one you'd like...

$5
Download of the album

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I'll write a song on a subject of your choice

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

I've just completed a
nine-week tour that involved playing gigs most nights of every week
throughout five different northern European countries. And once
again, I'm finishing the tour with some written reflections and
recollections from it. My observations probably get repetitive. I
go back to the same countries, for the most part. Although things
change in different ways each time, they stay similar more than they
change.

In the US things stay
similar more than they change, too. For anyone who read my
reflections on the similarly extensive tour I did last fall in North
America, the differences between that tour and this one in Europe
will be fairly obvious. Recent protests against police brutality
throughout the US notwithstanding, the Left more broadly has been in
a fairly anemic state in most of the US for most of the past decade
or so. This anemic state is reflected very starkly in my gigs there,
such as with most of my gigs last fall, which were some of the
worst-paying, most badly-attended gigs I've done since I started
touring full-time in the 1990's, overall.

Not so in Europe, where my
audiences continue to either grow or stay similar in size. Somehow,
almost magically, it seems, my audiences in much of Europe don't age,
either. Somehow, young people keep discovering my music and coming
to my gigs there. Is that because the Left is so much more active in
northern Europe as compared to the US? Are there more people in
Europe who give a shit than there are in the US? To both questions,
I would say the answer is a simple “no.”

Then why did my tour of the
US last fall involve an average audience size of fewer than 20
people, whereas in Europe there were often close to or more than 100
people coming to many of my shows? Why did the tour last fall
involve exactly zero protest rallies, whereas in Europe I sang at six
of them in three different countries? All involving stages, nice
sound systems, and crowds in the high hundreds or low thousands. In
one case, tens of thousands.

In the US, the politicians
from both parties seem to become more and more conservative by the
year (what the rest of the world calls “liberal” or
“neoliberal”). In northern Europe, the far right's electoral
gains generally seem to eclipse the Left's gains, just as the “Tea
Party” gain ground on the other side of the pond. In the US, the
anemic Left looks to South American social movements and electoral
politics for inspiration, just as the northern Europeans look to
Greece and Spain.

My very differing
experiences can be summed up in many relevant ways, but being both an
American and a poet, I'm tempted to boil it all down to a one-word
soundbite: infrastructure.
There may be a similar proportion of activist-inclined types in
Sweden compared to the US, but look what the Swedes have to work with
that are either entirely absent or almost entirely absent in the US.

Unions.
Unions that own property in every city and most towns in the
country, where they use their vast financial resources to
systematically fund cultural events, visiting speakers, adult
education. Unions that run resorts for their members.

Truly
Left political parties – not pseudo-progressive “caucuses”
within otherwise neoliberal, corrupt organizations, such as the
virtually worthless entities like the Progressive Caucus, but actual Left political parties with significant
representation in parliament.

Leftwing
social centers. Liberated territory occupied by anarchists,
communists, punks and hippies (though rarely all at the same time).
Self-run, independent social centers – not a function room in a
fundamentally alienating environment like a Christian church. No
offense intended to all you wonderful progressive Christians, but
most of us on the Left are atheists, last I checked, and having Jesus
hanging on the cross behind me when I'm trying to do a gig is not a
welcoming environment. (Though the fact that the churches are often
free or very cheap to use, even in cities where virtually nothing
else is free or cheap to use, is a major factor that will surely keep
the Left using churches in the US for many years to come.)

I
left Portland, Oregon on the first day of April, landing in Hamburg
on the morning of April 2nd.
The great revelation for me that made this tour of Europe
technically easier than any before it was owed to the fact that for
whatever reason, if you have a contract with T-Mobile in the US, you
can now roam the world with an unlimited data connection for no extra
cost. For someone like me, it's hard to overstate how handy this
development has been.

I
also discovered Instagram in earnest at the beginning of the tour, so
this tour has been especially well-documented with my best efforts at
photography to date (though my real photographer friends have only
been rarely impressed at my efforts). You can judge for yourself...

I
landed in Hamburg because the rental cars are cheaper there than in
Scandinavia, and it's nearby. But my first gig was north of
Copenhagen, in the town of Helsingor. It was the annual conference
of a Trotskyist party, with folks from all over Scandinavia
participating. I somehow accidentally made a joke about an icepick
(I meant pickaxe, but it came out wrong). No one called me a
Stalinist, so it was all OK.

The
month of April was fairly evenly divided between Denmark and Sweden,
but Swedes played an especially prominent role in my life that month,
in both Denmark and Sweden. My two-week tour of Sweden was all
organized by a Swedish songwriter named Kristian von Svensson, and
most of my gigs in Denmark involved opening sets by another Swede
named Elona Planman.

The
first gig that Elona and I did together was that first gig of my
tour, in Helsingor. Elona is an amazing songwriter and a
spellbinding performer. And she pretty much writes exclusively in
Swedish, a language I do not understand. How, you may wonder, do I
then know that she's so good? Answer: the same way I know I'm good.
Not by assessing various aspects of the songs themselves so much as
by assessing the reactions of the audience.

When Elona makes a joke,
the audience laughs. When she sings a sad song, the audience cries.
Simple as that. Although she has also given me rough English
translations of her songs, and they're really good. Despite the fact
that none of her songs are as overtly political as, say, mine tend to
be, she completely won over audiences of Trotskyists, retired union
members, elderly folk music aficionados, and teenage anarchists
alike.

I
first met Elona two years earlier, when her life was mostly full of a
wild project known as the Floating City. Which is essentially a
metal ship the size and shape of a city block, which will hopefully
soon be floating on the water, rather than inside a warehouse, where
it's been now for many years, in construction.

We
had a gig together back then, and when I went to visit the Floating
City later in the week, we spent most of an afternoon with me giving
her a guitar lesson. She was clearly sucking up everything I showed
her, like a proverbial sponge. And then hearing what she's been
doing since then, doing these gigs together, it was so gratifying to
hear so clearly how thoroughly she had absorbed all that stuff, and
worked at it daily. Which is not at all to say that I deserve any
significant credit for Elona's development as a guitarist. But it's
still so gratifying on those rare occasions when you can clearly tell
that music tips I gave were understood, absorbed, and incorporated.
Students like that make teachers happy...

The
days between gigs for Elona and I were spent largely at a
multifaceted place a few kilometers down the road from Helsingor, in
the little coastal village of Hellebaek. Run by founders of an
alternative school system which was eventually more or less banned by
the Danish government, the buildings where the schools used to run
out of are all still in operation, since those running the schools
had the wisdom to buy property, rather than rent it. So when the
Danish state's largesse was no longer available, the physical
infrastructure was still there, and now there's the Hellebaek B&B,
among other things happening there.

And
what a B&B it is. Not just great meals, but eaten in the company
of some of the most interesting, knowledgeable teachers and
organizers I've ever met, who have spent their decades-long careers
teaching, working, and traveling throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and
the Americas. Every day was a new lesson in the history of Danish
social democracy or the bizarre and tragic fate of the Algerian
revolution.

About
half of the rooms one might stay at at the old school in Hellebaek
are overlooking the forest – one of the few parts of Denmark where
you will find the kinds of miles-long trails winding through the
woods that people more commonly associate with Sweden or Norway. The
other half of the rooms, like the one I was staying in during my
various visits to the place throughout the month of April, overlook
the Baltic Sea.

Whether
you're overlooking the woods or overlooking the sea, it's a
meditative place to be. But it was while I was looking across the
Baltic at Sweden, which is as close as it gets to Denmark at that
point, close enough to see some of the buildings in the Swedish town
of Helsingborg, that I heard the news of the ship full of refugees
that sank in the Mediterranean, with around a thousand dead. This
prompted thoughts once again for me of the much luckier Danish
refugees who fled to Sweden in 1943, and this time I wrote a song
about them.

For
Kristian von Svensson and I, the focus of the tour was Joe Hill.
Specifically, this year is the 100th
anniversary of the execution by firing squad in the state of Utah of
the Swedish poet, songwriter, cartoonist and labor organizer, Joel
Emanuel Haglund (who later changed his name to Joe Hill, after
getting blacklisted under his original name).

Kristian
is another great Swedish songwriter, with a decidedly more
traditional folky style, particularly in terms of his guitar playing.
He is also a novelist, and possessed of an incredibly impressive
knowledge of Scandinavian history, as well as history of lots of
other places in the world. We knew we wanted to make Joe Hill a
central theme of our gigs, but the way that ended up coming together
was basically a happy accident. Without really coordinating our
presentation – which was also half if Swedish (Kristian's half) and
half in English – what we basically ended up doing every night was
Kristian would focus on the man, his music, and a sampling of music
from more recent times that was clearly influenced by the man, and I
would mainly tell stories and sing songs that put the IWW of Joe
Hill's day into some kind of historical context.

The
last gig of our tour together was in Sweden's second city, the
beautiful, canal-filled, coastal city of Gothenberg. (Like so many
of Europe's most attractive cities, it was largely designed by Dutch
engineers.) This show was well-recorded, and if you want to get a
flavor of the way I worked Joe Hill into the thing, here's the set I
did.

And
for those of you who have organized events in the US, always in
search of some kind of free or inexpensive venue to use, almost
always a space that isn't quite what we might hope for, that isn't
really Ours, let me tell you about the venues Kristian and I played
in. In Gothenberg, the five-story building in the center of the city
owned by the Communist Party, appropriately named Marx-Engels Huset
(“huset” meaning either “house” or “building” or
“center,” depending on the context). And at this gig, along with
many Swedish communists, a Canadian one as well – Kevin Neish, who
was in Sweden to help with the Swedish Ship to Gaza, getting their
newly-purchased boat into shape for an ocean voyage from Sweden to
the besieged Gaza Strip. Kevin came to the show in his impeccable
Lenin outfit, much to the pleasure of many in attendance.

Other
venues included Stockholm's chief punk rock social centers, the
venerable Cafe 44 in the center of town, and the magnificent,
multicolored plastic architectural achievement in the outskirts of
town known as Cyklopen.

And
in Gavle, Joe Hill's home town, we played in the back yard of the
house Joe grew up in, which has for decades now been owned and run by
the anarcho-syndicalist Swedish trade union, SAC.

Of
the dozen or so gigs we did in Sweden, all the rest were in
union-owned, union-run social centers known as ABF Huset – the
adult education wing of the social democratic union movement, where
Kristian and I were just another of an unending series of educational
and cultural events hosted and funded by these centers.

Among
the many conversations Kristian and I had during our many long drives
through different parts of Sweden, was one about the state of
Palestinian football. I had been reading about football, and
Palestinian football in particular, on and off for months, trying to
be inspired to write a song about the Palestine national football
team, but with no luck. What should the hook line be? That's always
the biggest hurdle for me.

Then
Kristian let me in on a well-known expression within football circles
– “the ball is round,” meaning, roughly, anything can happen.
That was it, I thought, and then the song wrote itself, as they do,
once you have a good hook line to center it all around. Soon
afterward, Palestinian football was making international headlines,
as FIFA was considering the possibility of disallowing Israel from
participating in the association, as a way of punishing the Israeli
government for their systematic practice of preventing Palestinian
players from being able to get to matches.

And
then back in Denmark. More venues of various kinds, with the same
common theme of Left ownership – more or less permanent fixtures of
the Danish Left. Oktober Books, owned and run by a small communist
party in Copenhagen. A longstanding squatted social center near the
center of town called Folkets Hus.

In
three different parts of the country, adult education centers run by
the Danish labor union, 3F. Another union-sponsored May 1 event in
Arhus, and a punk rock social center in Alborg that gets subsidies
from the Danish culture ministry for hosting punk rock shows – and
the government funds them with the full knowledge that putting on
Leftwing punk rock shows is primarily what they do!

I
have had many friends in the US who have been involved with the Green
Party and other small political parties, who have engaged in more or
less symbolic opposition to the two dominant parties, rarely winning
actual elections. In Europe, many of the people who were union
organizers or teenage leftists of one kind or another are now older,
and elected members of their local municipal, regional or national
legislatures. From these positions they continue to organize events
like they used to, except now sometimes they take place in the
parliament or the city hall, as was the case with two of the gigs I
did in Germany.

The
first gig in Germany on this tour, in a union-owned venue a block
from the main train station, was yet another crowd of close to 100
people, organized by a wonderful couple who are my self-proclaimed
“biggest lesbian fans in Hamburg.” They've organized several of
my best gigs in Hamburg over the years, and attended many others, but
it was only on this visit that I learned of the family background of
Katharina Jacob.

I
was booked to play at a communist-run festival on May 9th,
but my friends mentioned to me that on the previous evening, May 8th,
there would be a walking tour of Hamburg organized by some other
fine, upstanding reds. Many people in Germany are claiming as theirs
the notion of Liberation – that is, liberation from fascism, the
liberation that formerly Nazi-occupied countries throughout Europe
celebrate, usually on some date in early May, depending. Though
Germany lay in ruins, with millions and millions of Germans dead, May
8th
also marked the end of fascist tyranny, the date in 1945 when
suddenly, being a Jew or a communist or even a social democrat was no
longer a death sentence.

The
walking tour involved bits of street theater, music, and brief talks
about different events that had taken place in different parts of
town – people who had been found and sent to concentration camps
here, others who successfully passed on secret information there. A
refugee detention center now, which was once a Nazi-run prison, where
Katharina's grandmother was on a hunger strike. The legislature,
where her grandfather, Franz, was once on the City Council.

In
Switzerland I had another lovely gig at the massive squatted
social center in Bern known as the Reitschule (it was once a school). Folks who run the place were talking about how there's always a chronic shortage of volunteers willing to be involved with the nitty gritty of keeping a place like that going. I heard this theme often. The thing is, if they have just enough folks to do that work, the result can be having an institution like this, which keeps so much of a scene going. A comparatively little effort can have very amplified results, with infrastructure beneath it all.

I also played for the first time in a punk pub called Walhalla, in
the snow-capped mountain village of Davos. So now I can finally say
that I have not only been to Hell (a very small town near Trondheim
airport in Norway), but I have also played in Walhalla.

It
was with great trepidation that I learned at some point while in
continental Europe that my dear friend and longtime musical
co-conspirator, John Baine, aka Attila the Stockbroker, had a spot of
cancer on the lining of his bladder. By the time I saw him at the
Glastonwick Beer and Punk Rock Festival that he's been running every
year for twenty years now, it seemed the beloved, besieged National
Health Service (NHS) medical practitioners at his local hospital had
zapped the tumor successfully.

After
singing in April at a protest in Copenhagen against Denmark's
purchase of new fighter jets, another protest in Copenhagen against
fracking, a protest in Stockholm against the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Protocol (TTIP), and another TTIP protest in southwestern
Germany in May, my tour of Europe would end at the beginning of June,
as previous European tours have ended in years past, singing at two
different protest rallies happening around this year's big G8
meetings – now the G7, since Russia got kicked out for allegedly
doing the same kind of shit that all the other G7 members do
regularly. (That is, invading other countries without UN approval.)

The
rally in Munich where I sang on June 4th
was organized by a wide variety of parliamentary and
extraparliamentary groups including Die Linke, the Pirate Party,
Attac and others, and involved 34,000 participants according to the
police estimates. The town where the actual G7 summit was taking
place was over an hour's drive from Munich, on the German-Austrian
border. In actuality the drive took much longer than that, because
of several police checkpoints which were set up on all the roads
leading to the quaint little village of Garmish in every direction,
starting quite a ways from the actual town, manned by cops who
totaled, altogether during the summit, 17,000 in number.

I
roll with the punches when it comes to singing at protests, because
there's always a major element of unpredictability to these things,
for all kinds of reasons. In the case of the event Attac and others
were organizing in Garmish on June 6th,
I started out being less than hopeful about it, in terms of the
prospects for me having much of an audience, because I've been around
the block and know how these things often go. That is, I knew the
beginning would likely be good, and it was. Despite all the
fear-mongering and checkpoints everywhere, thousands of people
managed to get to the town, the camp that was eventually allowed to
be set up, and the rally. There were speakers and musicians. Then
the march started.

I
knew that the starting of the march, and the plans to have a sort of
mini-festival afterwards, could go different ways. Often what
happens is marches go on too long, and slowly peter out, with people
leaving in dribs and drabs, so plans to have a thing after the march
often just don't really pan out. Of course, another thing that's
always likely to happen during a march, is kettling, mass arrests,
and police brutality. This one did not involve mass arrests, but did
involve a lot of kettling, and everything took hours longer than
planned.

What was to be a 5 pm return to the stage became 7 pm or
so, and when the remnants of the march did eventually make it back to
the stage, what immediately followed was an absolutely torrential
downpour, combined with copious bolts of lightning and blasts of
thunder. I got two-thirds of the way through with one song before
the decision was made to shut down the stage, for fear of
electrocution (quite sensibly I'm sure). A band full of very nice
guys from Bologna, Italy was to be the final act of the event, but
after driving all the way to Germany from Bologna, they didn't end up
playing a note.

The
last supper of this tour was my first-ever meal at an Indonesian
restaurant, in Eindhoven, one of the larger cities in the little
country that once ruled colonial Indonesia, the Netherlands. I gave
virtually no notice about my swing through town, but several friends
were able to join me there, including the infamous Armand, who has
once again been riding high with massive amounts of media publicity
coming from all ends of the country, due in large part because a
popular Dutch band called the Kik has just put out an album
consisting entirely of songs of Armand's.

Except
for one song, which is his Dutch version of my song, “the Commons.”
Armand brought with him a magazine that featured his smiling face on
the cover, and really well-done photos of his face within the
magazine, accompanying the nine-page-long article about him.

“You're
in the phone book,” were Armand's first words to me, as he
sauntered in to the establishment, a while after the rest of us had
gotten there. He then sat down and found the bit where he talks
about me and “the Commons.”

In
case you're wondering whether having a famous Dutch band record a
Dutch version of one of your songs makes a difference in one's
musical career, as far as I can tell, it doesn't. But then again,
the album's not actually out yet, so who knows.

And
then before I put my phone back into flight mode, sitting on the
connecting flight that will finally take me home to Portland from a
very long layover in Detroit's spacious, sterile airport, I find an
email from the singer of the Scottish band, the Wakes, who have just
put out a three-song album on Bandcamp, a benefit for folks in
Bethlehem, the first track of which is easily the best version of
“They're Building A Wall” that has ever been made.

Which
fits in well with the infrastructure theme. That's the kind of
infrastructure we don't want. We don't want fighter jets, fracking
drills, or walled ghettos. We want punk rock social centers, union
resorts, and commie book stores.